...a photoBook is an autonomous art form, comparable with a piece of sculpture, a play or a film. The photographs lose their own photographic character as things 'in themselves' and become parts, translated into printing ink, of a dramatic event called a book...
- Dutch photography critic Ralph Prins

dinsdag 24 maart 2015

To mark the sixtieth birthday of photographer Anton Corbijn, the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag is organising a retrospective entitled HOLLANDS DEEP. The exhibition will feature highlights from all Corbijn’s series. It will start with the grainy black-and-white photos he took of musicians in the 1970s and ’80s and show how he constantly expanded his horizon to address new themes and experiment with different techniques and materials in later series.

The aim of this major retrospective is to show Anton Corbijn’s evolution as a self-taught photographer and to reveal the diversity of his subjects and techniques. The show will also trace the search for his ‘roots’. In the 2001-2002 series a.somebody, Corbijn pictures musicians like Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Sid Vicious and John Lennon against the background of his own birthplace Strijen, a village surrounded by the waters of the Hollands Deep. The one issue is that all these artists are deceased and had never been to the village when they were alive. In fact, the pictures are all of Corbijn himself, dressed up as his dead heroes. “The series is about death in my place of birth. It combines my obsession with music with my parents’ obsession with life after death. At home I was always taught that one should keep a low profile. It took me years to realise I had actually always wanted to be somebody and my work brings me closer to people who have achieved that.”

In 1989 Corbijn interrupted his stream of monochrome black-and-white work to produce lith prints that were quite different in tone, form and to some extent even in content, since he expanded his range of subjects to include actors, directors, writer and models, as well as musicians. In the late ’90s, he embarked on his first conceptual series, 33 Still Lives, in which he used the methods of the paparazzi to introduce a new element of mystery into the celebrity world. At the same time, he paid homage to the film still in a series of shots of non-existing films. Visually, this series – to be included in full in the Gemeentemuseum’s exhibition – looks like film posters bleached by the sun so that only the blue tone and a particular shade of red still remain.

His conceptual adventures were followed by Inwards and Onwards, which begun around 2002. This series reverts to the black-and-white portrait genre but focuses mainly on visual artists whom Corbijn finds inspiring – figures like Anselm Kiefer, Luc Tuymans, Peter Doig and Ai WeiWei. In the exhibition, separate small display areas will be devoted to ventures like strippinggirls (2000), Corbijn’s collaborative project with artist Marlene Dumas, and to photographs of the fashion world and of writers.

Portrait photographer Anton Corbijn doesn’t much like to look back at his work in the music industry. But for the Hague Museum of Photography’s forthcoming exhibition 1-2-3-4 he has done just that. Searching his archive, he has selected more than 300 shots of bands and singers: everybody from Nirvana, U2 and Nick Cave to Siouxsie Sioux, REM and the Rolling Stones. Many of the photographs are now going on show to the public for the very first time.

Anton Corbijn (b. Strijen, 1955) has had a major influence on international music and portrait photography. The creative, off-beat way he has photographed performing artists since the 1970s has become his personal trademark. His striking portraits strip away the mask, often at lightning speed, to reveal another aspect of the subject’s personality. Or, indeed, they impose literal masks, as in the case of the Rolling Stones, U2 and Arcade Fire, to lend the subjects an almost mythic aura.

Even without masks, however, Corbijn’s photographs always have an air of mystery. Time and again, he endows his work with an extra layer of complexity by the way he depicts the subject and through the use of an array of photographic techniques. The physical setting also plays an important part in his work. Most of his photographs are taken outside the studio and are loosely staged. For this exhibition, Corbijn has selected from his archive dozens of works in which the background location is important.

Corbijn regards himself as a cross between a traditional portrait photographer and a documentary photographer out to record people in their own physical surroundings and social circumstances. Inspiration for the dramatic effects he achieves in his photographs, including their strong contrasts and graininess, came in the 1970s from the determinedly unorthodox documentary photographs of people like Ed van der Elsken and Koen Wessing.

Lasting partnerships of the kind that he has had with many singers and bands are a rarity in the music world. His working relationship with U2 and Depeche Mode (DM), for example, goes right back to the early eighties and there is good reason why Corbijn is often called the fifth member of U2 or the fourth of DM. The pictures, album covers and video clips he has produced over the years have had a major influence on the images of those and many other bands.

For Depeche Mode he has gone further, designing not only the band’s logos and record covers, but also (since 1993) their stage sets. Corbijn’s work for DM will be displayed separately in this exhibition and presented as a single great Gesamtkunstwerk. In 1980 Corbijn was briefly on the road with female punk group The Slits. His reportage now goes on show to the public for the very first time.

These days, Corbijn is more than just a photographer. His work as a director of music videos (since 1983) and feature films (since 2007) takes up an increasingly large proportion of his time.

zondag 22 maart 2015

Robert Frank: Paris

Published by SteidlEdited by Robert Frank, Ute Eskildsen.

The publication of Paris marks the first time that the significant body of photographs which Robert Frank made in Paris in the early 1950s have been brought together in a single book. Having left Switzerland in 1924, this 1951 trip to France was only Frank's second return to Europe after he had settled in New York City in 1947, and some of the images he made during that visit have become iconic in the history of the medium. The 80 photographs reproduced here, which were selected by Frank and editor Ute Eskildsen, suggest that Frank's experience of the "new world" had sharpened his eye for European urbanism. He saw the city's streets as a stage for human activity and focused particularly on the flower sellers. His work clearly references Atget and invokes the tradition of the flaneur.

After purchasing and reading Robert Frank’s Paris, published by Steidl in 2008, I have been hesitating to publish my book review. Part of my procrastination was purchasing a copy of Frank’s The Americans, published by Steidl as part of their “Robert Frank Project”, as a baseline for comparison. And I am happy that I did buy The Americans, as it does make even more apparent the designer hack-job done on Frank’s Paris.

As background, Paris is a re-edit of prior work for a newly conceived bookwork developed from Frank’s photographs made between 1949 and 1952 while he bounced between Europe (mostly Paris) and United States (mostly NYC). Two other newly conceived bookworks that Steidl has recently published of Frank’s early photographs are London/Wales and Peru, which I have not seen yet. I hope that they have fared better.

For me, it was of great interest to see the photographs that Frank was making up to creating The Americans. The biggest issue of course is that the body of work is edited some 50+ years after the fact, with all of the historical baggage and current thinking. If we were to step back in time, perhaps we could see what the context that Frank was developing prior toThe Americans. But we can not, so we need to see what Frank has extracted now from what he had created then, and dig that data mind with him.

So with that, the bad news/good news and I need to get the bad news out of the way first, to give myself some space to discuss the photographic content within the covers. Simply that the book design suffers!

Okay, that felt good, but now why. Unlike the republished The Americans, in which Frank has a design say, this book was designed for design sake. Someone forgot to remind the designers that they are there to work for the photographer and his body of work, to place it in the best light. Unlike The Americans, every photograph in Paris is bleeding off the page, off every conceivable edge. The photographs are then further diminished by running many across the gutter and losing content in that same gutter. We get a glimpse of the potential and not the whole story.

We deserve better than this design crap, uber scheisse, and Frank does not need to have his work trashed. Shame on you Gerhard Steidl and Sarah Winter for putting your self first at the expense of the photographer, whom you say you are trying to tell his story. Let him fail on his own accord, don’t push him into the ditch. I guess this why publishers don’t like to have the photographer help with the book designs, might bring in some common sense and true design sensibility. Alright, I am done venting…

Now for the good news, when you can put together enough of the pieces and see the hints of the photographs left behind by the design team, you will find that same wit, even with my limited knowledge of the French language, iconic vision and delightful essence of The Americans. Such that we can see we are been seen. There are more atmospheric images in Paris, dealing with figures in the hazy fog, adding a different context of mystery. All of that unsettling vision of his is ever evident.

Is Paris now a controversial book for the Parisians as Frank’s The Americans was for the Americans in the late 1950’s, early 1960’s. I don’t think so, as that cutting edge is gone, if not dulled, by time and the images are not that contemporary by today’s standards. The book does provide a broader insight into what Frank’s photography was developing into at the time, that The Americans was no fluke.

I just can not recommend this book, as good at the photographs are, the design flaws can not be overcome, they are too great a distraction, the content has been too hacked. Maybe there might be improvement in the second edition? I would not hold my breath.

If you want to have a great book about Robert Frank in your photographic book collection, I would rather recommend you purchase The Americans, and not waste your money onParis. I think you would be much happier in the long run.

In response to a commission to 'document' Gabon, Broomberg & Chanarin made several trips to the West African country to photograph a series of rare initiation rituals, using only Kodak film stock that had expired in the 1960's. In the late 1970's the French-Swiss filmdirector Jean Luc Godard famously claimed that this early colour film was inherently 'racist', because it was better at depicting white rather than black skin. Using outdated chemical processes Broomberg & Chanarin salvaged just a single frame from the many rolls of expired film they exposed during these trips. This piece called Ektachrome 78 serves as a starting point for the exhibition.

Another key work in the exhibition is a billboard-sized photograph of Shirley, a 1950's model for the Kodak Eastman Company. Her portrait was distributed to photography labs all over the world as a visual reference for correct exposure. Shirley became a benchmark for 'normal' Caucasian skin. In the eighties, Kodak eventually developed a colour film that was capable of rendering darker tones. The company director described this film as being able to "photograph the details of a dark horse in low light."

Kodak Ektachrome 78 and Shirley are presented alongside works whose parameters were dictated to Broomberg & Chanarin by archival material of their deceased family friend, amateur photographer and anatomist, Dr. Rosenberg. After their trips to West Africa they inherited his darkroom equipment. Some of his notes were about making photographic test strips to determine the correct exposure time. Broomberg & Chanarin followed these instructions to produce a series of oversized darkroom experiments they call Strip Tests.

The connection between photography and racism is further explored in the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement series. In 1970, Caroline Hunter, a young chemist working for the Polaroid Corporation based in the United States, stumbled upon evidence that her company indirectly supported the apartheid regime in South Africa. Polaroid was able to provide their ID-2 camera system to the South African state, to efficiently produce images for the infamous passbooks, which the black population was required to carry with them. The camera included a boost button designed to increase the flash when photographing subjects with dark skin, and two lenses which allowed for the production of a portrait and profile image on the same sheet of film. Hunter and her partner Ken Williams formed the Polaroid Workers Revolutionary Movement, and successfully campaigned for a boycott of the apartheid government. Broomberg & Chanarin's series of Polaroids, made with a renovated Polaroid ID camera, considers the proposition that prejudice might be inherent in the medium of photography itself.